By Peter Wehner
Tuesday, October 29, 2024
Many Republicans would say that it is one thing, and
quite an awful thing, to withhold a vote from Donald Trump—but that voting for
Kamala Harris, a “San Francisco Democrat,” is nothing short of a betrayal, an
act of apostasy, impossible for any true conservative to justify.
They’re wrong, though in one respect it’s understandable
why they’re wrong. Harris is hardly an avatar of conservatism. She is, after
all, a lifelong Democrat who, in her ill-fated campaign for president in 2019,
positioned herself as a progressive champion. She embraced positions that I
believe ranged from silly to harmful. But it’s a more complicated story than
that.
During Harris’s pre-Senate career, when she served as
district attorney in San Francisco and then as attorney general of California,
her record was generally pragmatic and moderate. In those roles, according
to Don Kusler, the national director of Americans for Democratic Action,
her record was one “that would have many liberals, particularly our California
colleagues, angered or at least rolling their eyes.” Progressives had a much
deeper relationship with President Joe Biden than with Vice President Harris; according
to The Washington Post, “They fear that under Harris they would lose
the unique access they had to the West Wing.” The New Democrat Coalition, a
moderate faction in the House, says it’s the part of the caucus most closely
aligned with Harris.
Nor are progressives particularly happy that during the
2024 campaign, Harris has broken with some of her previous liberal stances,
such as opposing fracking, decriminalizing border crossing, and ending private
health insurance. Harris has spent the closing stretch of the campaign
appearing with the likes of Liz Cheney, not Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. She has
emphasized her support for Ukraine in its war of survival against Russia, and
risks losing Michigan because she is viewed by some in her party as too supportive
of Israel. During the campaign, Harris has shared that she owns a Glock, said she’d
appoint a Republican to her Cabinet, and declared that she’s a “capitalist”
who wants “pragmatic” solutions. Her economic focus is on tax breaks for the
middle class and on creating opportunities for small businesses. Her economic
plan, the Post points out, contained few items on the liberal wish list.
Progressive groups say they are finding a “significant
enthusiasm deficit” among left-wing voters.
It would be an affectation to say that Harris is a
conservative champion, just as it would be a caricature to portray her now as a
far-left liberal. She is neither, and if she’s elected president, she is likely
to govern from the center-left, at least on most things.
***
But the strongest conservative case for voting for
Harris doesn’t have nearly as much to do with her as it has to do with her
opponent. Trump remains a far more fundamental threat to conservatism than
Harris. Trump has, in a way no Democrat ever could, changed the GOP from within
and broken with the most important tenets of conservatism. That’s no surprise,
because his desire isn’t to conserve; it is to burn things to the ground. In
that respect and others, Trump is temperamentally much more of a Jacobin than
a Burkean.
He has transformed the Republican Party in his image in ways that exceed what
any other American politician has done in modern times.
Start with character. The GOP once championed the central
importance of character in political leaders, and especially presidents. It
believed that serious personal misconduct was disqualifying, in part because of
the example it would send to the young and its corrosive effects on our
culture. It lamented that America was slouching towards Gomorrah.
In 1998, when a Democrat, Bill Clinton, was president and
embroiled in a sexual scandal, the Southern Baptist Convention—whose membership
is overwhelmingly conservative —passed the “Resolution
on Moral Character of Public Officials,” which said, “Tolerance of serious
wrong by leaders sears the conscience of the culture, spawns unrestrained
immorality and lawlessness in the society, and surely results in God’s
judgment.” It added, “We urge all Americans to embrace and act on the conviction
that character does count in public office, and to elect those officials and
candidates who, although imperfect, demonstrate consistent honesty, moral
purity and the highest character.”
Yet for a decade now, Republicans, and in particular
white evangelicals, have celebrated as their leader a felon and pathological
liar; a person whose companies have committed bank, insurance, tax, and charity
fraud; a sexual predator who paid hush money to a porn star; a person of
uncommon cruelty and crudity who has mocked the war dead, POWs, Gold
Star families, and people with disabilities. Under Trump, the party of
“family values” has become a moral freak show.
Trump has also profoundly reshaped the GOP’s public
policy. The GOP is now, at the national level, effectively pro-choice,
and, due in part to Trump, the pro-life movement is “in a state of political
collapse,” in the
words of David French, of The New York Times.
The Republican Party, pre-Trump, was pro–free trade; Trump calls himself “Tariff Man”
and referred
to tariff as “the most beautiful word in the
dictionary.” (In July, Trump
proposed across-the-board tariffs of 10 to 20 percent,
and rates of 60 percent or higher on imports from China.) He epitomizes crony capitalism,
an economic system in which individuals and businesses with political
connections and influence are favored.
For several generations, Republican presidents have, to
varying degrees, promoted plans to reform entitlement programs in order to
avert fiscal catastrophe. Trump has done the opposite. He has repeatedly
said that entitlement programs are off-limits. As
president, Trump shredded federalism and made a mockery of our constitutional
system of government by his
use of executive orders to bypass Congress. He made little effort to shrink
government, and lots of efforts to expand it.
On spending,
$4.8 trillion in non-COVID-related debt was added during Trump’s single term,
while for Biden the figure is $2.2 trillion. Trump added
more debt than any other president in history. A Wall
Street Journal survey of 50 economists found that
65 percent of them see Trump’s proposed policies putting more upward pressure
on the federal deficit than Harris’s, and 68 percent said prices would rise
faster under Trump than under Harris. And the Committee for a Responsible
Federal Budget found that Trump’s policies would increase budget deficits by $7.5
trillion over the next decade, compared with $3.5 trillion for Harris.
Pre-Trump Republican presidents celebrated the diversity
that immigrants brought to the nation, and the contributions they made to
America. “All of the immigrants who came to us brought their own music,
literature, customs, and ideas,” Ronald Reagan said in a
speech in Shanghai in 1984. “And the marvelous thing, a thing of which
we’re proud, is they did not have to relinquish these things in order to fit
in. In fact, what they brought to America became American. And this diversity
has more than enriched us; it has literally shaped us.” George W. Bush urged
America to be a “welcoming society,” one that assimilates new arrivals and
“upholds the great tradition of the melting pot,” which “has made us one nation
out of many peoples.”
Trump is cut from a very different cloth. He curtailed legal
immigration during his presidency. Temporary visas for
highly skilled noncitizen workers were reduced.
Refugee admissions were slashed.
Trump, who peddled outrageous lies against Haitian immigrants in Springfield,
Ohio, says he plans to strip them of their legal status. (At his rallies,
Trump has whipped the crowds into a frenzy, getting them to chant,
“Send them back! Send them back! Send them back!”)
Edith Olmsted pointed
out in The New Republic that during his first
term, Trump rescinded Temporary Protective Status orders for immigrants from El
Salvador, Haiti, Nicaragua, Sudan, Nepal, and Honduras, “placing hundreds of
thousands of legal residents at risk for deportation.” Trump, who refers to
America as an “occupied
country” and “a
garbage can for the world,” also said he plans to reinstate a ban on travelers from some countries
with Muslim-majority populations. And although previous Republicans have
attempted to slow illegal border crossings, none has dehumanized those crossing
the border by using language from Mein Kampf (“poisoning the blood of our country”).
Trump believes American national identity is based not on allegiance to certain
ideals but on ethnic and religious background.
It is in foreign policy, though, that Trump may be most
antithetical to the policies and approach of modern conservatism. Reagan was a
fierce, relentless opponent of the Soviet Union. “The one thing Reagan was more
passionate about than anything else was the unsupportable phenomenon of
totalitarian power, enslaving a large part of the world’s population,” according
to Edmund Morris, a Reagan biographer.
Trump is the opposite. He admires and is enchanted by the
world’s most brutal dictators, including Vladimir Putin, Xi Jinping, Kim
Jong Un, and others. Trump is at best indifferent
to the fate of Ukraine in its war against Russia; one
suspects that deep down, he’s rooting for his friend Putin. Reagan mythologized
America; Trump trash-talks
it. Reagan was a great champion of NATO; Trump is a reflexive critic who, according to his former national security adviser John Bolton, would
withdraw from the alliance in a second term. Reagan made human rights a
centerpiece of his foreign policy; during his term, Trump praised China’s
forced internment of a million or more Uyghurs as “exactly the right thing to
do,” according
to Bolton.
Here and there, now and then, Trump is conservative—on
court appointments, for example—but it’s something that he’s stumbled into, for
reasons of political expediency, and that he’s just as liable to stumble away
from. (Trump was pro-choice
before he was pro-life before he moved once again toward the pro-choice camp.)
Trump is fundamentally a populist and a demagogue, a destroyer of institutions
and a conspiracy theorist, a champion of right-wing identity politics who
stokes grievances and rage. He has an unprecedented capacity to turn people
into the darkest versions of themselves. But he is something even beyond that.
***
In recent weeks, Trump has been called a fascist—not by
liberal Democratic strategists, but by people who worked closely with him. They
include retired
General John Kelly, who served as Trump’s chief of staff; retired
General Mark Milley, who served as chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff
during the Trump presidency; and Mark Esper, Trump’s former secretary of
defense, who has said that Trump has fascistic “inclinations” and is “unfit
for office.” In addition, retired General James Mattis, who also served as
Trump’s secretary of defense, has said he
agrees with Milley’s assessment. And Dan Coats, Trump’s former director of
national intelligence, has said he suspects that
Trump is being blackmailed by Putin.
The historian Robert Paxton, one of the nation’s foremost
experts on fascism, was initially reluctant to apply the term fascism to
Trump. The label is toxic and used too promiscuously, he believed. But January
6, 2021, changed all of that.
“The turn to violence was so explicit and so overt and so
intentional, that you had to change what you said about it,” Paxton told Elisabeth Zerofsky, a contributing writer for The New
York Times Magazine. “It just seemed to me that a new language was
necessary, because a new thing was happening.”
Trump’s “open encouragement of civic violence to overturn
an election crosses a red line,” Paxton wrote in Newsweek shortly after Trump supporters violently
stormed the Capitol. “The label now seems not just acceptable but necessary.”
Paxton could add to the parade of horribles the fact that
Trump encouraged the mob to
hang his own vice president, came
very close to deploying 10,000 active-duty troops to
the streets of the nation’s capital to shoot protesters, invited
hostile foreign powers to intervene in our election,
and extorted
an ally to find dirt on his opponents. Paxton could
have mentioned that Trump threatened prosecutors, judges, and their families;
referred to his political opponents as “vermin” and the “enemy
from within”; and called the imprisoned individuals who stormed the Capitol
“great
patriots.” He could have cited Trump’s call for the “termination” of parts
of the Constitution and his insinuation that Milley deserved to be executed for treason.
Trump’s supporters may be enraged by the fascist label,
but they cannot erase the words or the deeds of the man to whom the label
applies. And the only way for the GOP to become a sane, conservative party
again is by ridding itself of Trump, which is why even conservatives who oppose
Harris’s policies should vote for her. Harris’s election is the only thing that
can break the hold of Trump on his party.
Acquaintances of mine, and acquaintances of friends of
mine, say that they find Trump contemptible, but that they can’t vote for
Harris, because they disagree with her on policy. My response is simple: The
position she once held on fracking may be bad, but fascism is worse. The
position she holds on any issue may be bad, but fascism is worse.
A friend told me he won’t vote for either Harris or
Trump. If Trump wins a second term, he said, “I suspect he will give more
attention to his golf game than to siccing the IRS, FBI, or whoever on his
political opponents.” His message to me, in other words, is to relax a bit.
Trump may be a moral wreck, but he won’t act on his most outlandish threats.
My view is that when those seeking positions of power
promote political violence, have a long record of lawlessness, are nihilistic,
and embody a “will to power” ethic; make extralegal attempts to maintain power
and stop the peaceful transfer of power; and use the words of fascists to tell
the world that they are determined to exact vengeance—it’s probably wise to
take them at their word.
If Trump wins the presidency again, conservatism will be
homeless, a philosophy without a party, probably for at least a generation. And
the damage to America, the nation Republicans claim to love, will be
incalculable, perhaps irreversible. The stakes are that high.
Harris becoming president may not be the best thing that
could happen to conservatism. But if she becomes president, she will have
prevented the worst thing that could happen to conservatism and, much more
important, to the country.
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